Guest Post: Interior Renovations

Greg Baker, (among many things, a trusted friend and ecumenical colleague to me) offers beautiful words here for you to read this Advent. I pray that his words can help you see truthful things about the inside of your house. EGC

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.”

-T. S. Eliot, East Coker

I have heard tell of an old Advent tradition somewhere in northern America. I am not sure if it is true, but I want it to be true. As the story goes, an Advent tradition developed wherein as the first snow arrived people would take the wheels off their carriages and decorate one wheel with evergreens and candles. It was a symbol of the liturgical season and a way of admitting that the season for staying put had come. It was time to cease from travel, slow down and stay inside.

[https://www.pinterest.com/pin/12736811422469367/]

Slowing down always sounds like medicine for the soul. When the pandemic first hit in March and my family and I were mandated to stay at home, it felt like an unexpected blessing at first. We had a glut of long-lost time together. I was almost at peace for about two weeks, even while I was nervous for what was unfolding around the world and heavy-hearted for accumulating confirmed cases and deaths.

“Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.”

Then anxious energy kicked in more fully. When I walked into certain rooms in my house, I found my eyes drawn towards unfinished projects and imperfections everywhere, both from my own careless work and from the previous owners. How did I ever leave that trim so poorly aligned?

Before long I was filling this unexpected time at home almost compulsively with projects. On one level, these projects around the house afford me an opportunity to let my analytical and over-theologizing mind rest for a while as I focus on concrete projects with clear results. The mind needs to rest, and more importantly, I need time to experience myself as more than just my mind. On another level, I know that at times I fill my life with these projects because I simply cannot handle the stillness and cannot bear to look at the incompleteness around me (and within me).

One of my favorite mystics of the Christian tradition, Teresa of Avila, compares the soul to a great mansion. Sometimes I stop to imagine my interior life in this way. I have my rooms where I like to hang out, and I have my rooms that I prefer to avoid. For Teresa, the point of the spiritual life is to move to the innermost room where the God who is limitless love forever seeks to unite with each person. In this most intimate of places I am no longer in control. God perfects my weaknesses. I am remade. My perpetual restlessness gives way to an embrace that assures every deep insecurity…Meanwhile, I prefer to stick with the outer, more superficial rooms with tools in hand.

[https://renovare.org/articles/conversing-with-teresa-of-avila]

“Pointing to the agony of death and birth.”

Preparing for the Christ child, I have been taught to wonder about the great mystery of the eternal God become fully human in a lowly and vulnerable infant. But what about my own birth? The longer I live, the more I wonder if I give too much credit to the finality of my birth over 40 years ago. In the innermost chambers where the Beloved knows me, I am still being formed; I am slowly gestating. A force beyond me is chiseling away at me, often when I am not paying attention, giving me a chance to become something a self that is more recognizable to my Maker. My wife, who has known the experience of carrying and delivering four children, knows spiritual truths that I cannot begin to understand. She tells me, “After giving birth I think I am better prepared for my own death. I have learned to relent and be at peace when another force takes over my body and I lose all control over what is happening to me.”

[https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/307863324521975172/]

“Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”

Spiritual masters talk about the “apophatic way” of knowing, which holds that sometimes we encounter truth and reality not through tangible experiences or light, but rather in spaces marked by darkness, emptiness, or lack of clarity. This Advent of 2020 I wait in my house, not quite sure how to think or hope or love. T. S. Eliot penned his words not out of cynicism or faithlessness, but out of hard experiences of the ways in which God works. He encountered too many moments in life that humbled him to the point of confessing that he needed to remove the wagon wheels, stay inside, and reclaim his interior life from its incessant turning.

Too often I have believed that Advent is about waiting and hoping for something outside of me to come again. Advent gently challenges me to inquire if I am ready this year to set down my tools, just for a little while. I am the one who needs renovating and the birth for which I am still preparing is my own.